The IDH (Interactive Digital Humans) team is one of the five robotic research groups within the French Laboratory LIRMM (Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier) at Université de Montpellier 2. Its research focuses on physical human‐robot interaction involving cognitive or sensory processes in the control. Activities include the interpretation of human motion, haptic and physiological (e.g., EMG, EEG) data. Besides, IDH pays particular attention to vision‐force control for advanced interaction, and to multi‐contact planning using physical contact with the environment.

In recent years, the IDH group has proven, through various works [1‐4], its capability of achieving the objectives of EUROC challenge 1. In [1], a multimodal (vision/force) control framework has been devised to enable collaborative human/robot product assembly. An industrial manipulator Kuka LWR, has been controlled with ROS, to tighten screws on rivets inserted in a flank by a human operator. Human activity recognition is obtained through vision, while force control guarantees safety of operation and precise riveting. A cooperative manipulation task (specifically, transportation of bulky objects) has been realized in [2], by tracking the human activity via the exchanged force measurements. That work has been extended in [3], by adding vision to provide richer information on the task and human intention. In both works, the object pose is controlled using the humanoid robot two hands. Preliminary studies on dual arm manipulation have been carried out in [4]. In that work, the robot arm is controlled to manipulate objects in collaboration with the human arm, but the approach will be extended, in the near future, to control the motion of two robotics arms.

The team members’ expertise are complementary: Andrea Cherubini is a specialist of visual servoing, André Crosnier has a strong know-how on haptics and human‐robot interaction, and Philippe Fraisse is an expert on force control and dual manipulation. As for the younger members, Julien Batonnet has hands‐on experience on robot software architectures including simulation engines, and Mohamed Sorour is a PhD student working on collaborative robotics in the manufacturing industry.